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Seth MacFarlane enjoys playing a crude teddy bear so much, it seems almost cruel, not to mention redundant, to point out yet again that his humour is wildly racist, sexist, profane and juvenile.

It can also be funny, although the laughter is mainly of the guilty I-can’t-believe-he-just-said-that kind.

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Which leads us to Ted 2, and also a consumer warning. If you didn’t see and laugh at the first Ted, and maybe also at MacFarlane’s button-pushing TV series Family Guy, then another movie deserves your entertainment dollars.

This sequel to the riotously successful 2012 summer comedy has MacFarlane again directing, co-writing and voicing the title bruin, a sentient toy with a deceptively sweet face and the filthiest of minds and mouths.

Also back is Mark Wahlberg as doofus sidekick John, Ted’s loyal “thunder buddy for life,” who strangely seems to have a fake Boston accent, even though Wahlberg hails from Beantown.

Jessica Barth returns as Ted’s human girlfriend Tami-Lynn, who figures more prominently in the story. Another encore is Giovanni Ribisi’s bear-napping loner Donny, who is superfluous to both of these overlong movies.

Ted 2 is every bit as over-the-top as its predecessor, with all the bong hits, beer guzzling and penis jokes this implies. Song-and-dance routines suggest MacFarlane really hankers to do an old-fashioned Disney musical.

But the absurdity of the overall concept reaches new heights.

After blithely accepting Ted as a living thing in the first film, Ted 2 seeks to prove he’s a person, not merely a material freak of magic. He wants to legally marry his grocery store co-worker Tami-Lynn and also have a child with her, either through artificial insemination (since he lacks the requisite man parts) or adoption.

This requires not only huge suspension of disbelief but also a lawyer to argue the case. Enter Amanda Seyfried, whose courtroom advocate Samantha L. Jackson (see what they did there?) is the not-so-secret weapon of Ted 2.

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She succeeds Mila Kunis, Wahlberg’s love interest from the first Ted. Her absence is reportedly due to real-world pregnancy.

Seyfried makes for a better-than-expected replacement, and not just to play the straight woman for sexist jokes, although there are plenty of those, along with a running gag about her resemblance to a Tolkien film character.

She does things you don’t expect and makes you laugh without feeling guilty. Seyfried sifts gold from the dross of Ted 2’s screenplay, which MacFarlane co-wrote with Alec Sulkin and Wellesley Wild, and which tries really hard to be dumb and smart at the same time.

The film’s many celebrity cameos either satirize things we expect of people, such as a certain action star’s taciturn manner, or attempt to shock us with things we don’t expect, such as a late-show comedian’s supposed predilection for random washroom sex.

It’s hit-and-miss stuff, but when it connects, it really does. When Ted and John covertly assess the massiveness of a sport star’s manhood, in one of the film’s best moments, the scene amusingly brings to mind Wahlberg’s early fame as the endowed porn star of Boogie Nights.

And you can’t help but grin at a stoner’s take on Jurassic Park, replete with John Williams’ inspirational original score. In your face, Jurassic World!

Other times, these smart alecks are too clever by half, and too full of themselves to recognize that a joke is improved by brevity, not length or repetition.

Repeated comparisons between Ted’s quest for person status and the civil rights struggles of enslaved black people are neither appropriate nor funny, even when a character in the film calls out Ted for making the connection.

It’s also a little weird to see a revered actor, one who played a legendary freedom fighter in another film, get involved in Ted’s legal quest. For those who desire to be seen as a good sport, anything goes, just as it’s apparently OK for MacFarlane to voice offensive things as long as he has a cuddly bear saying them.

One person’s unspeakably bad taste is another person’s daring comedy. Ted 2 has a joke about the Charlie Hebdo office massacre that is appalling even by this movie’s low standards — yet it’s exactly the kind of humour Charlie Hebdo would celebrate, so what are we to think?

I can picture Ted on the cover of Charlie Hebdo, doing something outrageous. That’s actually a more appealing thought than the inevitability of a Ted 3.

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